Review

Many firms grapple with extending agile beyond their dev teams. This often spawns a Frankenstein "water-scrum-fall" model. Enter impact mapping. A strategic tool that can help bridge the divide between business and technical teams. It fosters shared understanding of business, language, and a unified planning approach.

A concise presentation of the concept, in a straightforward and practical manner. While impact mapping isn't a panacea, it could potentially shift discussions with stakeholders away from mere requirements and towards outcomes.

How to collaborate and make a big impact.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Impact maps are a strategic planning tool, they visually illustrating the WHY, WHO, HOW, and WHAT of a problem.
• They directly link solutions to user benefits, making assumptions explicit and providing context for decision making.
• Impact maps expose areas of uncertainty and facilitate a shift from directive, push-based methods to adaptive, pull-based approaches in software development.
• Impact maps aid in creating better-aligned plans and roadmaps, enhancing team collaboration.

• An impact map is a collaboratively drawn mind-map. It visualises scope and underlying assumptions by answering four questions: why, who, how, and what.

1. Why are we doing this? The goal we’re trying to achieve.
2. Who can produce the desired effect? Who can obstruct it? Who will be impacted? The actors that can influence the outcome. Who are the decision makers, user groups and customer segments. Be specific. 'User' is too broad.
3. How should our actors' behaviour change? How can they help us achieve our goals? How can they obstruct or prevent us? The impacts we want to create. Focus on activities and behaviour, don’t confuse with features.
4. What can we do as an organisation or a delivery team? Deliverables, features or organisational activities. Introduce scope only after the first three questions. Impact maps link requirements to value, making it easier to have conversations around value. Breakdown deliverables into independent chunks that provide clear business value. They can help you avoid over investing in less important actors or impacts. Throw out deliverables that don’t contribute to any important impact for your goal. Keep it high level, break them down into detail later.

Never aim to implement the whole map. Instead, find the shortest path through the map to the goal.

• Online Gaming Worked Example
• Why: increase number of players to 1 million
• Who: players
• How: inviting friends
• What: incentives (chips, or other recommendation)

• The three key roles of Impact maps are strategic planning, defining quality and roadmap management
• Strategic Planning: Collaborate with cross-functional leadership to understand the business scope of at the outset. Get clear on the vision and the goals. Impact maps help groups discover quick wins, and alternative solutions that deliver the same outcomes faster.
• Defining Quality: A shared understanding of the outcome we’re trying to achieve, and the behaviours we’re trying to change helps us focus on impact not functionality. Clear metrics based on behaviour change are the key unlock.
• Roadmap Management: An impact map communicates scope, goals and priorities but also assumptions on two levels. Combine Impact Maps with frequent iterative releases to measure progress.
• Scope creep is reduced by mapping deliverables to goals and measuring progress. It’s easier to spot wrong solutions (or pet solutions) that won’t affect our goal.
• Many projects fail because the business goal is too vague. Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timely). Making objectives measurable allows us to determine if we've established the right goals. It helps to align everyone's actions and define precise and deliverable outcomes.
• Assign metrics that help you understand whether or not you’re investing in the right area of the map.
• Impact maps focus us on behaviour change and how we can observe it.
• Advice from Tim Harford’s book ‘Adapt’:
• Variation: explore and implement new ideas
• Survivability: test new ideas at a survivable scale
• Selection: use feedback and learn from mistakes
• Continuously delivering items that are too small to make a difference from a business perspective causes a disconnect between business and delivery. Impact maps help us report progress at a more meaningful level
• You’ll have better prioritisation conversations if you engage business leaders on prioritising business problems (not scope and features).
• Avoid creating too many user stories too quickly. Impact maps help you prioritise and plan at a high level, use user stories once you’ve agreed a direction.
• Visualisation in a meeting is worth 80 points of IQ because it releases energy, intelligence and creativity in the room.
• Respond to questions about costs and times by asking: How valuable is this? How much do you want to invest? When do you want it?

Creating an impact Map:

• Preparation:

1. Discover real goals: Express your vision as expected business goals. If objectives are unclear, use questions to reverse engineer the intent behind features.
2. Define good measurements: Discussing how to measure success starts conversations about viability and priorities. Establish precise measurements by agreeing…
• Scale: what we’ll measure
• Meter: how we’ll measure it
• Benchmark: what the situation is like now
• Minimum acceptable value
• Constraint: for investment
• Target: the desired value
3. Plan your first milestone: Scrutinise if everything needs to be a part of the current milestone. Use dot voting to narrow down to one objective.

• Mapping:

1. Draw the map skeleton: Place the first milestone in the center of the map, connecting a few key deliverables to it. Populate with an initial set of actors, impacts, and deliverables. If you have a feature wishlist, reverse-engineer the key ones.
• What is the simplest way to support this activity? What else could we do?
• If we're unsure about the assumption, what is the simplest way to test it?
• Could we test it without software?
• Could we start earning with a partly manual process?
2. Find alternatives: Define as many alternatives as you can, but limit the discussion to actors and behaviour impacts. Have small groups work independently, reviewing results every 20 minutes. Find a better or cheaper solution, or a shorter journey to the key objectives.
3. Identify key priorities: Find the best path by assessing possible obstructions, looking for high-value low-hanging fruit, and thinking through key assumptions. Use dot voting if necessary. Focus on prioritising impacts, not deliverables and scope.
• Use the KANO or purpose-alignment models if needed.
4. Earn or Learn: Now focus on possible deliverables, everything should directly contribute towards the centre of the map. Include experimental scope and validation BUT set a learning budget in time or cost.

Are we sure that the assumption behind our #1 item is correct? If the answer is ‘No’, find a way to test the assumption within your learning budget.

• Measure results as early as possible. Deliverables that fail to produce results point to invalid assumptions. Meanwhile, validated assumptions could justify further investment.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Introductions and Forwards

• Impact maps are a strategic planning tool, they visually illustrating the WHY, WHO, HOW, and WHAT of a problem.
• The method originates from 'InUse effect mapping' and 'feature injection'.
• They directly link solutions to user benefits, making assumptions explicit and providing context for decision making.
• Impact maps expose areas of uncertainty and facilitate a shift from directive, push-based methods to adaptive, pull-based approaches in software development.
• This approach encourages a cross-disciplinary team to address problems or opportunities together.
• Impact maps aid in creating better-aligned plans and roadmaps, enhancing team collaboration.
• They are less bureaucratic and easier to implement compared to other techniques.

Part 1: What Is an Impact Map?

• An impact map is a collaboratively drawn mind-map. It visualises scope and underlying assumptions by answering four questions: why, who, how, and what.

1. Why are we doing this? The goal we’re trying to achieve.
• Setting a goal provides teams with the flexibility to explore various methods of achieving it and enables them to adapt to changes.
• Success is achieving your goal, even if it's through a method you didn't originally envision. Conversely, even if you build what you envisioned but miss the ultimate goal, you’ve failed.
• SMART (Specific, Measurable, Action-Oriented, Realistic, and Timely) goals help you re-evaluate plans as new information becomes available.
• Goals should present the problem, not the solution. Don't confuse scope.
2. Who can produce the desired effect? Who can obstruct it? Who will be impacted? The actors that can influence the outcome.
• Who are the decision makers, user groups and customer segments.
• Three types of actors (Alistair Cockburn):
• Primary actors: whose goals are fulfilled.
• Secondary actors: who provide services.
• Off-stage actors: who have an interest in behaviours, but are not benefiting or providing a service (regulators, decision makers).
• Be specific. 'User' is too broad.
• Define in this order: specific individual, user persona, job title, group or department.
3. How should our actors' behaviour change? How can they help us achieve our goals? How can they obstruct or prevent us? The impacts we want to create.
• Understand what jobs customers want to get done.
• Consider the desired change in behaviour you want to bring about.
• The impacts of which could be competing, conflicting, or complementary.
• This helps us decide which impact best contributes toward the goal (and the risks)
• List only the impacts that help the goal.
• Focus on activities and behaviour, don’t confuse with features.
• Show a change in behaviour (not just the actual behaviour).
4. What can we do as an organisation or a delivery team? Deliverables, features or organisational activities.
• Introduce scope only after the first three questions.
• Impact maps link requirements to value, making it easier to have conversations around value.
• Breakdown deliverables into independent chunks that provide clear business value.
• Can help you avoid over investing in less important actors or impacts.
• Throw out deliverables that don’t contribute to any important impact for your goal.
• This is the least important part of the map, iterate on it later.
• Treat deliverables as options, don’t try to deliver everything.
• Keep it high level, break them down into detail later.

Never aim to implement the whole map. Instead, find the shortest path through the map to the goal.

• Online Gaming Worked Example
• Why: increase number of players to 1 million
• Who: players
• How: inviting friends
• What: incentives (chips, or other recommendation)

Part 2: The Role of Impact Maps

• Goal-oriented requirement engineering methods results in more focus and less waste.
• Upfront plans are fragile in a changing landscape, iterative plans lack the bigger picture. Impact maps reconcile these approaches, allowing a big-picture view but also learning through delivery.
• The three key roles of Impact maps are strategic planning, defining quality and roadmap management
• Strategic Planning: Collaborate with cross-functional leadership to understand the business scope of at the outset. Get clear on the vision and the goals. Impact maps help groups discover quick wins, and alternative solutions that deliver the same outcomes faster.
• Defining Quality: A shared understanding of the outcome we’re trying to achieve, and the behaviours we’re trying to change helps us focus on impact not functionality. Clear metrics based on behaviour change are the key unlock.
• Roadmap Management: An impact map communicates scope, goals and priorities but also assumptions on two levels. Combine Impact Maps with frequent iterative releases to measure progress.
• Impact maps solve common planning and delivery problems:
• Scope creep is reduced by mapping deliverables to goals and measuring progress.
• It’s easier to spot wrong solutions (or pet solutions) that won’t affect our goal.
• They highlight the key assumptions that need to be tracked and validated.
• Setting measurable objectives:
• Many projects fail because the business goal is too vague. Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Realistic, and Timely).
• Making objectives measurable allows us to determine if we've established the right goals. It helps to align everyone's actions and define precise and deliverable outcomes.
• Avoid vanity metrics, things which are easy to measure.
• Assign metrics that help you understand whether or not you’re investing in the right area of the map
• Impact maps focus us on behaviour change and how we can observe it.
• Make sure metrics don’t become an end in themselves.
• Adaptive planning balances metric-driven plans, with impact maps checking the validity of assumptions and progress.
• Advice from Tim Harford’s book ‘Adapt’:
• Variation: explore and implement new ideas
• Survivability: test new ideas at a survivable scale
• Selection: use feedback and learn from mistakes
• Impact mapping supports the two key principles from the Lean Startup:
• Build-Measure-Learn → small iterative deliveries to facilitate learning)
• Validated learning → by testing assumptions and setting success criteria
• Iterative delivery is supported because of the focus on clarifying business objectives and thinking of software scope as assumptions that could be wrong.
• Continuously delivering items that are too small to make a difference from a business perspective causes a disconnect between business and delivery.
• Impact maps help us report progress at a more meaningful level
• You’ll have better prioritisation conversations if you engage business leaders on prioritising business problems (not scope and features).
• Branches on the impact map help us identify opportunities for iterative, not incremental, delivery.
• Avoid creating too many user stories too quickly. Impact maps help you prioritise and plan at a high level, use user stories once you’ve agreed a direction. If your story doesn’t fit into your impact map then it’s not needed in this delivery cycle.
• Impact Maps are crucial in the divergence and convergence phases of design thinking. They serve as a platform for discussing different approaches. The focus on 'impact' and 'actors' is significant as it aligns with the user-centred and empathy-based approach of design thinking.
• Impact maps make meetings more effective as visual facilitation increasing participation, allows for prioritisation and aids group memory. Visualisation is worth 80 points of IQ because it releases energy, intelligence and creativity in the room.
• They can help with team building too, they’re similar to the team building process of: Why are we here? Who are you? What are we doing? How are we going to do it?
• Respond to questions about costs and times by asking: How valuable is this? How much do you want to invest? When do you want it?

Part 3: Creating an Impact Map

Preparation:

1. Discover real goals: Express your vision as expected business goals. Try and limit to one for the development cycle. If objectives are unclear, use questions to reverse engineer the intent behind features to start the conversation. Get to something that shows how to save money, earn money or protect money.
2. Define good measurements: Discussing how to measure success starts conversations about viability and priorities. Measurements of high value have a lot of uncertainty. Establish precise measurements by agreeing…
• Scale: what we’ll measure
• Meter: how we’ll measure it
• Benchmark: what the situation is like now
• Minimum acceptable value
• Constraint: for investment
• Target: the desired value
3. Plan your first milestone: Scrutinise if everything needs to be a part of the current milestone. Use dot voting to narrow down to one objective if you can. Get the team to take on the challenge iteratively, focusing on one thing at a time (rather than many things in parallel).
• Example Milestone: More players, no negative impact on retention, 100% increase in costs if needed

	MORE PLAYERS IN 6 MONTHS	OPERATIONAL COSTS	PLAYER RETENTION
SCALE	# monthly active players	Hosting costs + ops salaries.	% players returning one week after sign-up
METER	Game Database	Financial Accounts	Game Database
BENCHMARK	350,000	$50,000	32.00%
CONSTRAINT	800,000	$100,000	32.00%
TARGET	1,000,000	$50,000	32.00%

Mapping:

1. Draw the map skeleton: Put the first milestone into the centre of the map, connect a few key deliverables to it. Populate with initial set of actors, impacts and deliverables. If you Have a shopping list of features, reverse engineer the key ones. Ask: How likely is it that it will contribute to the impact? Is the impact valid for the actor? Will the impact contribute to the goal? Use the structure: ‘Someone can help us achieve our objectives by doing something differently.’
2. Find alternatives: Define as many alternatives as you can, but limit the discussion to actors and behaviour impacts. Get small groups to work independently, review results every 20 minutes. Find a better or cheaper solution, or a shorter journey to the key objectives. What else could stakeholders do for you? Who else can help? How? Who will obstruct us?
3. Identify key priorities: Find the best path by assessing possible obstructions, looking ofr high-value low-handing fruit, and thinking through the key assumptions. Use dot voting if you need to. Focus on prioritising impacts not deliverables and scope.
• Use the KANO or purpose-alignment models if you need.
4. Earn or Learn: Now focus on possible deliverables, everything should directly contribute toward the centre of the map. Include experimental scope and validation BUT set a learning budget in time or cost. Useful questions:
• What is the simplest way to support this activity? What else could we do?
• If we're unsure about the assumption, what is the simplest way to test it?
• Could we test it without software?
• Could we start earning with a partly manual process?

Are we sure that the assumption behind our #1 item is correct? If the answer is ‘No’, find a way to test the assumption within your learning budget.

• Add measurements to the map as bullet points (For example: # Active monthly players 350k-1m [Min 850k]) or by adding metrics tables.
• Measure progress and decide whether to keep going in the same direction or pivot to something different. Measure results as early as possible. Deliverables that fail to produce results point to invalid assumptions. Meanwhile, validated assumptions could justify further investment.
• Delivery projects in iterations no larger than 2% of the overall investment.
• Stop once you achieve your milestone, and move onto the next one.
• Larger organisations should consider creating two maps, one for the high level product vision and one for the medium-term delivery.

Measure progress periodically against key milestone metrics. If the delivery fails to achieve key targets, it's time for a strategy rethink!

• Typical mistakes:
• Including too many people in workshops.
• Using bad rooms to run workshops (you need space for people to gather around a board)
• Criticizing too early can hinder the flow of ideas. Trust in the process to find the best ones.
• Relying on one big group. Split into smaller groups to mitigate for loud voices.
• Reverse-engineering an entire shopping list, it’s a waste of time (focus on the key items)
• Getting into too much detail too soon. Stay focused on the big picture and high level prioritisation. Focus on the impacts, and avoid discussions about scope until appropriate.
• Skipping over levels of the map.
• Mapping out goals without metrics.
• Allowing unrealistic goals to go unchecked.
• Getting dragged into detail, vs thinking broadly about actors, impacts and prioritisation.
• Only thinking about software, vs discovery / learning activities
• Taking through too many objectives, it’s better to split them into different milestones.